How do you know you're on a Stu shoot?

If you see something like this, it's a good sign:

The Orphanage wrapped a shoot last week for a new spot, and I got to play with this helicopter mock-up suspended on this giant forklift. Once again DP Ketil Dietrichson shot for me with the Viper, this time using DigiPrime lenses. The spot will be finished HD, which is becoming quite common for me these days.

After this discussion on the CML, I had been wanting to try the Viper with a corrective magenta filter. I don't have any issue with the green cast of the raw Viper filmstream output, but correcting for it on the lens should result in a broader dynamic range more evenly shared across R, G and B. So far I'm sold on this approach — the images we made look great, and the dynamic range will be put to the test with some sun glints off that helicopter mock-up. I'll post some images when the spot is done.

Here's an article that goes into more detail on the rationalle behind the magenta filtration.

Here's another with sample images, although I quibble with the author's characterization of the green cast as a "problem." One of the great strengths of raw images is their lack of built-in white balance, or any other subjective processing.

Images from Minis spot online

A couple of nice stills from the Ruby Tuesday Mini Cooper tie-in spot ("The Great Race") are online on the fxguide article. Check 'em out!

fxguide podcast

It's up! If you can't get enough of this linear stuff, check out my interview (download .mp3 link) on fxguide's awesome podcast. There's a great article that sums it up nicely as well.

I've also allowed fxguide to mirror my linear-light in AE7 workflow articles in hopes that they reach more people. ProLost is still the place to get the latest and greatest ramblings though.

Thanks very much to John Montgomery and everyone at fxguide for having me on the show. I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of the podcast (iTunes link), and it's an honor to be a part of it.

Maybe with all this I can finally shut up about this linear crap for a while!

A Tale of Three Blurs

There are three Blur effects in After Effects that are commonly used, have been upgraded to 32 bpc floating-point color for version 7, and are generally misunderstood.

Gaussian Blur

Gaussian Blur has the simplest UI of the three — “Blurriness” and options for blurring in X, Y or both. Historically, Gaussian Blur was known as the premium blur for those who could afford its increased render times. While this was once true, it is now purely a myth. Gaussian Blur uses the exact same blur engine as

Fast Blur

…except that Fast Blur adds a very important “Repeat Edge Pixels” option. So for the record, there is no advantage in using Gassian Blur over Fast Blur. Gaussian Blur is obsolete.

Box Blur

Box blur is like a Volvo. It’s boxy, but good. Oddly, it’s best feature is that it can, if desired, be less boxy than the other two.

Box Blur is the simplest kind of blur, and at its defaults produces “squarish” results. However, it features an Iterations slider that allows you to perform this box blur operation any number of times you would like. At three iterations, Box Blur is identical in quality to Fast Blur. At four or five, it is better, producing a softer, rounder blur. When blurring small, bright floating-point things, you may be glad for this extra quality.

Or you may find that at one iteration, Box Blur’s simple blur is a handy utility. For example, used in Horizontal or Vertical mode, Box Blur is a better approximation of motion blur than is Directional Blur. Photographic motion blur should have that squared-off look, not a Gaussian-esque smoothness.

The only bummer is that Box Blur’s main slider works differently than Fast Blur’s, so if you need to “upgrade” to Box Blur you’ll have to eyeball your values to match.

Since Box Blur does everything the other blurs do and more, I often reach for it first, usually setting Iterations to three or four by default.

So just like Carson Kressley’s rule of suit jacket buttons (middle, top, bottom = always, sometimes, never): 

• Box Blur = Always
• Fast Blur = Sometimes
• Gaussian Blur = Never